Commercial automatic inserting machines are available which offer tremendous labor savings costs by providing for the rapid insertion of discrete electrical components into printed circuit boards. These machines are specifically designed for the insertion of axial leaded electrical components which have their leads aligned parallel to each other. The outer ends of the axial leads of a component are held by two parallel bands of adhesive tape and the entire package is then wound onto a reel for shipment.
Axial leaded components may be packaged so that several thousand capacitors may be contained on one reel, several thousand electrical resistors may be packaged on a second reel, several thousand diodes may be packaged on still another reel. After the various components are packaged on their separate reels, they may be loaded onto a master sequencing machine which is controlled by a sequencing computer. The sequencing computer automatically selects and removes the desired components from the individual reels in a predetermined sequence. These components are then fed onto a conveyor chain one behind the other, a fraction of an inch apart, and are retaped into what is called a master reel package. The master reel package is then fed into the inserting machine which inserts the components, one at a time, into a pre-drilled printed circuit board that is indexed into position under the insertion jaws by a computer-controlled positioning table. After insertion of the components into the printed circuit board, the leads are cut to size and are clenched on the under side of the printed circuit board so that they will stay in position during a subsequent wave soldering operation.
The automatic insertion machinery described above is highly cost effective, however, but it could not, prior to this invention, effectively handle certain components which are not of the axial leaded variety that are often required in electrical circuits. For example, in many circuits capacitors of a high value or a high voltage rating may be required; and this type of capacitors is often constructed with radial leads due to cost considerations. Prior to the present invention, these radial leaded capacitors had to be hand fed into the printed circuit boards separately at a labor rate which was many times higher than that of an automatic insertion machine. The present invention provides a technique whereby radial leaded components may be packaged into a reel, sequenced and automatically inserted into printed circuit boards with essentially the same sequencing and automatic insertion equipment that is now presently used for axial leaded components.